This is Piketty at his most optimistic and succinct, in what could be considered a conclusion to his magisterial trilogy on equality. While his previous books have explained why inequality persists, here he reminds us, in a bit of welcome news, that overall equality in the West has increased over the past 200 years.
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Public Books Best Book of the Year
“An opportunity for readers to see Piketty bring his larger argument about the origins of inequality and his program for fighting it into high relief.” —Nicholas Lemann, New York Times
The world’s leading economist of inequality presents a short but sweeping and surprisingly optimistic history of human progress toward equality despite crises, disasters, and backsliding. A perfect introduction to the ideas developed in his monumental earlier books.
It’s easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality.
Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It’s a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But through it all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more just distribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fight against injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need to resist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions of people. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us how. The future is up to us.
Thomas Piketty is Professor of Economics and Economic History at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and at the Paris School of Economics and Codirector of the World Inequality Lab.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 The Movement toward Equality: The First Milestones 16
2 The Slow Deconcentration of Power and Property 30
3 The Heritage of Slavery and Colonialism 48
4 The Question of Reparations 68
5 Revolution, Status, and Class 95
6 The "Great Redistribution": 1914-1980 121
7 Democracy, Socialism, and Progressive Taxation 150
8 Real Equality against Discrimination 175
9 Exiting Neocolonialism 203
10 Toward, a Democratic, Ecological, and Multicultural Socialism 226
